The metadata muddle: How effective is call-tracking?

The Obama administration has proved adept at the public relations response to the surveillance leaks — but still hasn’t provided much evidence that sweeping up information on the phone calls of millions of Americans has been critical to the fight against terrorism.

Judging by the way officials have framed their answers during hours of congressional hearings, the administration has been seeking headlines touting a big tally of high-profile successes for the surveillance efforts. But the numbers of how many attacks or “terrorist events” were averted are murky.

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And the greatest deal of confusion seems to surround the issue of what successes can be traced to the controversial program that stores five years’ worth of data on virtually every telephone call made to, from or within the United States.

FBI Director Robert Mueller’s appearance at a Senate hearing Wednesday provided the latest set of ambiguous answers. Asked by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) how many cases the call-tracking database was “critical” to, Mueller said: “We’re working through the list of numbers — or not numbers — the list of cases. And of those, domestically, I think there will be anywhere from 10 or 12 where 215 was important in some way, shape or form.”

Like other officials and members of Congress, Mueller mixed comments about one program, sometimes referred to as Section 215 for the part of the PATRIOT Act used to justify it, with another system, called PRISM or sometimes Section 702 after the part of the 2008 law used to authorize it. The former attempts to collect data on every telephone call made in the U.S. and between the U.S. and abroad, while the latter acquires large volumes of data foreigners exchange on U.S.-based Internet, email and social media sites.

Mueller eventually said his estimate of 10 or 12 cases included information from both the phone metadata program and PRISM, and he couldn’t really break the numbers down more precisely.

“Some of them are 702. I’m not certain whether all of them are 215. They’re a combination, or one or the other,” Mueller said of the dozen or so U.S. cases he identified.

For the White House and congressional leaders, the challenge in justifying the programs to the public is that separating those numbers out leaves the program that’s more domestically controversial and unprecedented looking like a relatively minor contributor to counterterrorism efforts.

“They were conflating 215 and 702 as if this [the call-tracking program] was critical to everything,” Leahy complained.

A House hearing Tuesday produced breathless stories about National Security Agency snooping unraveling a plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange and heading off a total of more than 50 planned terrorist strikes worldwide since Sept. 11, 2001.

However, the caveats and qualifiers applicable to those attention-grabbing claims are at least as significant as the assertions themselves.

For one thing, NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander quickly acknowledged that most of the 50-plus plots averted were foreign — not a huge shock, since the tool most relied on is set up to capture communications between foreigners.

Asked to quantify the domestic impact of intelligence gathered from the call-tracking program, Alexander said it played a role in the “vast majority” of “just over 10” plots which resulted in prosecutions in the U.S. in recent years.